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You may (or may not) have noticed that I haven’t posted here in a few weeks. There’s a reason for that… an era is coming to an end. It’s time for me to move on from LosTechies – a community … Continue reading →

Every now and then I need to have a method support 2 or 3 arguments, providing a default value for one of them if only 2 are specified. My typical solution is to check the number of arguments passed to … Continue reading →

WebRTC is all kinds of super ninja epic awesomesauce stuff. If you haven’t looked in to it yet, you’re going to want to get on that soon. I’d suggest starting with the HTML5 Rocks post on getUserMedia. Build Your Own … Continue reading →

SignalLeaf uses Stripe.com for billing. One of the cool things it does is provide web hooks to get events so that you can have your system do things in response to those events. Examples of events include customer creation, customer … Continue reading →

Through an interesting turn of events, I was given an opportunity to place an ad for my Backbone Plugins eBook in a very prominent web development newsletter – one that has 175,000 subscribers. Needless to say, I jumped at the … Continue reading →

A few months ago, I posted a short list of sci-fi novels worth reading. It was a bit of an experiment for me to post that, since this is a technical blog. But the post seemed to be popular – … Continue reading →

SignalLeaf has 2 separate services, at this point: the web app and the media server. Both of these services are deployed to Heroku, each on their own Heroku app instance. This allows me to scale them as needed. I give … Continue reading →

If there’s one thing every screencaster needs, it’s high speed, high capacity storage for raw materials. I just finished up my 15th episode of WatchMeCode (and have recorded probably another 15 or 20 episodes other than those) - here’s the progress bar … Continue reading →

Cal Newport recently wrote a blog post questioning the value of ignoring gatekeepers in the publishing world. He took a quote from a podcast about self-publishing, and ran with it in the other direction. The original quote is: The podcast … Continue reading →

Anyone building a large enough app in NodeJS will tell you that it gets really really really frustrating to have 3 or more lines of this in every module you build: It’s ugly. It’s hard to read. It’s hard to … Continue reading →